Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Operation Dictatorship: Trump is poised to invoke the Insurrection Act
The claim that the administration is merely “exploring” the invocation of the [Insurrection Act] is a transparent lie. In reality, the decision has already been made. NBC News quoted one White House official as saying that the move is not “imminent”—an effort to sow complacency. In fact, the administration is preparing to invoke the act in connection with definite actions, which may include mass arrests, the violent suppression of opposition and the deployment of federal troops in cities throughout the United States.
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The chronology of events makes clear that Trump is working off a schedule. On Monday, Trump said he would invoke the act “if it was necessary,” saying, if “courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.” White House aide Stephen Miller then called federal court rulings against the deployment of the National Guard to Oregon an “insurrection.”
Yesterday, Trump hosted an extraordinary “roundtable” meeting at the White House with far-right and fascist media personalities to discuss the necessary actions to crush “Antifa,” a catch-all term used to refer to opposition to the fascistic actions of the administration. Trump repeated his threat to arrest Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The fascist spectacle, which was barely reported in the media, reached new depths when far-right propagandist Jack Posobiec praised Trump for confronting “Antifa,” tracing its “various iterations” back “almost 100 years … to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” By referencing Weimar, Posobiec drew a direct historical parallel between antifascist resistance to Hitler and current opposition to Trump’s dictatorship, lamenting that resistance to fascism had ever existed.
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... The 1807 act authorizes the president to deploy the military inside the United States to suppress “insurrections” and “rebellions.” Under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the use of the military in domestic law enforcement is generally prohibited. The Insurrection Act stands as the principal exception.
In American history, the use of the Insurrection Act, aside from its invocation by Abraham Lincoln following the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, has been associated with instances of reactionary oppression. President Andrew Jackson used it in 1831 to crush Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Insurrection Act became a weapon against the labor movement: deployed against the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the coal miners’ struggles in Colorado and West Virginia, and the 1932 Bonus Army march of unemployed veterans on Washington.
Now, the Insurrection Act is being invoked on an unlimited national scale to preempt popular opposition and as a pretext for establishing a presidential dictatorship. Beyond suspending habeas corpus, there is no “legal” authority more sweeping than the Insurrection Act in the entirety of American law. Invoking the Act would mean the president would effectively assume de facto and de jure control over urban areas or entire states, essentially replacing the authority of local and state governments. By invoking the Act in Portland and Chicago, Trump would be placing them under the control of the military, over which he is commander-in-chief.
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The response of the corporate media to Trump’s preparations is one of silence and complicity. As of Wednesday evening, more than 24 hours after the NBC report that the White House is drafting legal justifications to invoke the Insurrection Act, there was no reference to the threat on the New York Times front page. The Washington Post and CNN likewise buried or ignored the story, even as 500 National Guard soldiers arrived in Chicago under federal command.
Among Democratic officials, the response has been no less evasive or cowardly. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose state is at the center of the federal military deployments, warned that Trump’s actions are aimed at stealing the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential elections, and compared the administration’s tactics to those of the Nazis. Yet even these statements have been ignored.
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The deliberate downplaying of these developments is itself a political act. Within the political establishment and from the Democratic Party, there is broad acceptance of Trump’s course, either because they support it outright as a means of defending capitalist rule, or because they recognize that any serious opposition would require the mass mobilization of the working class, a prospect they fear far more than dictatorship itself.
As for the trade union apparatus, as hundreds of thousands of federal workers are being furloughed and the administration carries out a massive assault on jobs and social programs, they propose nothing. “Do your damn job, and pass a budget that’s going to require a little compromise,” declared Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, reducing the historic attack on the working class to a plea for bipartisan cooperation with the coup regime.
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There is broad and growing opposition to Trump’s actions within the American population. Polls show that substantial majorities reject the deployment of troops to US cities and the criminalization of political dissent. Millions are preparing to take part in the upcoming “No Kings” demonstrations on October 18, with more than 2,100 protests already scheduled in cities and towns across the country. Trump is clearly horrified by the scale of this emerging mass opposition, and it is a major factor accelerating his timetable for dictatorship.
The time has come to pull off the blinders. Every warning issued by the Socialist Equality Party about the preparations for dictatorship is being confirmed. Every day of this administration demolishes the pretense that the United States remains a functioning democracy. Capitalism can only be maintained through dictatorship. If this continues unchecked, it will be said that American democracy did not die with a bang, but with a whimper.
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Trump is not acting on his own. He is the personification of the breakdown of capitalism under the weight of insoluble contradictions. His government represents the capitalist oligarchy in its most unvarnished form. The methods now being employed are the methods of the criminal underworld elevated to the heights of bourgeois society.
To halt this descent into dictatorship, the working class must intervene as an independent political and organizational force. Workers must begin forming rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood to defend their coworkers, resist layoffs and cuts and organize opposition to the military occupation of American cities. These committees must become centers of resistance, uniting all sections of the working class and linking their struggles into a coordinated offensive against dictatorship and social inequality.
The Socialist Equality Party fights to build and expand the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to coordinate these efforts across industries and across borders. This global alliance provides the framework for uniting workers internationally against the common enemy—the capitalist oligarchy that is driving humanity toward dictatorship, war and poverty.
The growing anger over layoffs, the destruction of social programs and the militarization of society must be transformed into a conscious political movement against the entire system that produced Trump. The working class must advance its own program: the expropriation of the billionaires, the dismantling of the corporate and financial oligarchy and the reorganization of economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit. The defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the fight for socialism.
In an extraordinary public press conference held Wednesday in the White House, fascist President Donald Trump declared the full force of the US government will be brought down on alleged “antifa” elements. “Antifa,” short for “antifacism,” is not an organized political group but a broad set of beliefs generally centered on defense of democratic rights against right-wing state oppression.
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Trump, backed by numerous cabinet officials, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, characterized all opposition to ongoing federal immigration kidnapping operations as “illegal” and claimed that a “well-financed” and vast network of “left-wing terror” was behind the protests against his administration. Protests attended by millions of people this year, including the massive June 14 “No Kings” demonstrations, were not expressions of popular opposition to dictatorship but “paid protests” funded by domestic and foreign organizations, the administration claims.
Organizations and groups that were named as major antifa allies or accomplices by right-wing reporters invited to the White House included the Democratic Socialists of America, antiwar protest group CODEPINK, and Stop the Sweeps, a group that organizes against police sweeps of unhoused people. The latter was branded by a Turning Point USA lackey as an arm of the “homeless industrial complex.”
As was the case with his September 22 Executive Order, which declared “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump claimed in Wednesday’s event that all instances of violence against ICE officials, police and the killing of Charlie Kirk were the result of “antifa.” He claimed “antifa anarchists” were “paid provocateurs,” who were being “paid by people I dine with.” Trump repeatedly thanked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for cooperating with the administration in uncovering alleged “antifa funding” networks.
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Trump was flanked at the conference by Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller and a platoon of fascist agitators, many from Turning Point USA, including neo-Nazi Jack Posobiec. Following his remarks, Trump invited each of the fascist media propagandists to supplicate themselves before him while regaling him with alleged instances of antifa terror and violence.
Secretary Noem, without providing a shred of evidence, claimed that “antifa” had “infiltrated” the country and that the “antifa network” was “just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us just like the other terrorists we have dealt with for many many years, and today is the day we have a president that won’t tolerate it.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed Noem’s comments, “We are not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets. Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guys off the streets, it’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels, we are going to take the same approach, President Trump, with antifa. Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We are going to take them apart.”
The comments of Noem and Bondi equating domestic opposition to Trump’s regime to foreign terrorist organizations is aimed at criminalizing all opposition to the regime and potentially using military force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights.
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Under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) the president is allowed to kill alleged members of “FTOs” (Foreign Terrorist Organization) without due process. On September 30, 2011, US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was murdered in a US drone strike in Yemen that was authorized by President Barack Obama. Since this extrajudicial killing, every US president has conducted similar strikes against alleged “terrorists” without providing a shred of evidence or legal justification. In the last several weeks, the Trump administration has carried out repeated military strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing dozens of people the administration has alleged are gang members or drug runners, without providing any proof.
The Democrats, the Republican partners in crime, have responded to Trump’s threats to imprison them with their typical cowardice and fecklessness. They remain far more terrified of a mass movement from below against both parties and the system they defend than of the coming to power of a fascist government.
3. Why are the rail unions silent on Trump’s talk with Union Pacific’s CEO on where to deploy troops?
Nearly a month has passed since Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena advised Donald Trump on which American cities should be targeted for National Guard deployment. Yet the rail unions have maintained complete silence.
The meeting, formally convened to discuss the proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern (UP-NS), revealed the naked alliance between the corporate elite and the Trump administration. If approved, the merger (since endorsed by the SMART-TD union, whose members include conductors) would create the first transcontinental railroad under a single ownership, accelerating monopolization and attacks on jobs, conditions and safety.
But in the course of the meeting, the discussion turned to Trump’s strategy to establish a dictatorship. The would-be dictator asked Vena which American cities he should send troops into next. According to Trump, Vena named Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago.
Vena was identifying critical chokepoints in the rail system as targets for military repression. These are all key rail hubs where Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern lines converge. Chicago alone has seven major terminals and 12 more in the surrounding area. Significantly, since this meeting troops have been deployed to Chicago and are expected to be sent to Memphis in the next few days.
Like his White House dinners with tech billionaires, such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, this meeting showed Trump is acting as a political instrument of the financial oligarchy. Faced with mounting opposition to inequality, the ruling class is turning ever more directly to brute force. In Chicago, ICE agents are already conducting militarized raids against immigrants. With the arrival of the National Guard, rail workers will be among the next targets.
Since then, Trump’s plans have advanced considerably. On Wednesday, NBC carried a report that the White House is deep in discussions about invoking the Insurrection Act, a wartime measure for conditions of civil war. But while Lincoln used the Act in the furtherance of the war to abolish slavery, Trump aims to use it as the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933, giving a pseudo-legal pretext for ruling with unlimited powers.
The situation is urgent. Not a single established political institution, including above all the Democratic Party, has proven capable or even willing to stop Trump. Unless stopped by the working class, Trump’s campaign to set up a fascist dictatorship in America will succeed.
This is only possible through a rebellion against the union apparatus. Not a single rail union, including SMART-TD and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), has warned its members about this open collusion between Trump and the railroads. They are burying the danger under a veil of silence.
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The unions’ silence over Vena’s meeting with Trump takes their role as industrial policemen role to a new level. They are proving their loyalty not only to the corporations but to the capitalist state and the dictatorship Trump is building. Like all dictatorships, it must crush workers’ rights in order to survive—and the unions are determined to help.
Dear Kaiser Workers,
Your vote to strike on October 14 is a powerful expression of opposition to intolerable conditions. It must be met with the broadest possible support from workers across the country. The issues you face—unsafe staffing, sub-inflation pay raises and relentless overwork—are universal and unsustainable. They have driven a mass exodus from healthcare and threaten the survival of both patients and workers.
This fight, however, cannot be separated from the broader crisis confronting the entire working class. The Trump administration has already deployed troops to major American cities, tested mass repression in Portland and Chicago and is preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose martial law. These actions form part of a deliberate conspiracy to establish a fascist dictatorship, abolish democratic rights and crush the resistance of the working class through military force.
A critical part of this political offensive is a war against science and public health. The oligarchy’s aim is not to preserve life but to shorten it. By driving down life expectancy—through mass infection, chronic disease, poverty and the collapse of healthcare—the ruling class seeks to reduce spending on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, freeing trillions for corporate profits, tax cuts and war. The same criminal policy underlies the dismantling of hospitals, the ending of pandemic protections and the “normalization” of death on a mass scale.
The strike by 46,000 Kaiser workers has the potential to become a catalyst for a far broader mobilization of the working class against dictatorship and social inequality. It can unite workers across industries to defend their most fundamental democratic and social rights, including the right to high-quality, free healthcare for all.
The Alliance of Health Care Unions (AHCU) bureaucracy intends to limit the strike to five days or block it altogether as it did in 2021, when it called off the walkout at the last moment. That betrayal produced a sellout contract with unenforceable “staffing ratio” language and no mechanisms for workers to defend themselves. The Kaiser Workers Rank-and-File Committee opposed the 2021 sellout and must now be expanded to transfer power from the union apparatus to the healthcare workers on the hospital and clinic floors. Only through the formation and strengthening of such committees can workers take control of this struggle into their own hands and wage it to victory.
The WSWS Healthcare Workers Newsletter advances the following program for Kaiser workers:
- Enforce the democratic decision to strike. No last-minute cancellations!
- Fight for an open-ended, indefinite strike until all demands are won.
- Organize flying pickets to schools, docks and major workplaces to win mass support.
- Set staffing ratios by workers themselves, not management or bureaucrats.
- Defend immigrant workers and patients. Form committees to stop ICE from entering hospitals.
- Demand inflation-busting raises so workers can live near their jobs.
- Impose limits on overtime to end burnout and ensure safe, high-quality care.
- Guarantee free vaccination and COVID-19 protections for all patients and staff.
- Reinstate infection-control protocols and universal testing upon admission.
- Redirect Kaiser’s billions in profit toward medical care and wage increases.
Kaiser workers are not engaged in a merely economic struggle but a political one. The methods Trump is now using against immigrant workers—mass repression, kidnappings and deportations to concentration camps—will be turned against striking workers and all workers and youth who oppose the demands of the oligarchy.
The Kaiser Rank-and-File Committee can serve as the nucleus for uniting 46,000 Kaiser workers with millions of other workers across the United States to prepare mass, collective action, including a general strike, to drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power and defend the democratic and social rights of the working class.
This is a fight against the capitalist system and both corporate-controlled parties that defend it.
Hospitals have been transformed into profit-making enterprises for investors. Administrators and financiers treat the suffering and deaths of patients as the cost of doing business while reaping billions in profits—Even in the early days of the pandemic, they looted public aid through the CARES Act.
Kaiser’s “nonprofit” status is a fraud. It tripled its net income to $12.9 billion last year, with total assets of $74.1 billion. Management and the union bureaucracy justify austerity, while healthcare workers endure short staffing, lack of supplies and mandatory overtime. Inflation and falling real wages are forcing many to rely on overtime and long commutes simply to survive.
The Trump administration is using the ongoing government shutdown to escalate its drive toward authoritarian rule. It plans to permanently fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers, gut Social Security Disability Insurance and deepen unprecedented cuts to Medicaid through Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” These measures will devastate hospitals, push millions deeper into poverty and accelerate the dismantling of public healthcare.
Yet the Democratic Party has mounted no serious opposition. Congressional Democrats are appealing to Trump and the Republicans for a bipartisan “deal” to reopen the government while refusing to raise any demand to oppose Trump’s moves toward dictatorship. California Governor Gavin Newsom, for all his rhetorical criticisms of martial law plans, offers nothing but appeals to the courts—appeals that Trump openly disregards.
The Democrats and their allies in the trade union bureaucracy fear a mass movement of the working class against Trump far more than they fear dictatorship itself, because such a movement would threaten the very capitalist order they defend. They, like the Republicans, represent the same corporate and financial oligarchy that profits from war, austerity and the destruction of healthcare.
The destruction of public health is central to this fascistic agenda. Trump’s political allies, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are spearheading attacks on science—blocking vaccination programs, spreading lies about childhood vaccines and reviving anti-scientific myths, such as the claim that Tylenol causes autism. The ruling elite recognizes that genuine public health policy threatens its class interests, since profits depend on cutting care and driving up mortality. During the pandemic, more than 100,000 healthcare workers were sacrificed to this policy of social murder.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues today because both the big business politicians in both parties, including the Biden-Harris administration, sacrificed human life for corporate profit. New and more infectious variants are spreading through hospitals and communities, while the government and media conceal data, end testing, and dismantle all protections.
As healthcare workers confront ongoing outbreaks without PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), ventilation upgrades or isolation procedures, the same resources once promised for “pandemic preparedness” are being funneled into war and repression. The connection between the destruction of healthcare and the buildup of a police state could not be clearer.
Kaiser workers must unite with workers across all industries to intervene in this crisis through mass struggle. It is no coincidence that the unions have scheduled the Kaiser strike to end the day before the second “No Kings” protest on October 18, when millions are expected to march against authoritarianism. In June, between 5 to 11 million workers and youth joined the first “No Kings” demonstrations. The union bureaucracy fears that your struggle could merge with this growing movement against oligarchic rule and capitalist inequality.
But unifying the fight of Kaiser workers with the growing opposition to dictatorship is exactly what is needed. If Kaiser workers take control of this struggle, defy the sabotage of the union bureaucracy and wage a determined struggle to win their demands, they can unite with the millions of workers and young people opposing the genocide in Gaza, fascism, high living costs and social inequality.
This movement must be politically independent of both capitalist parties and unite black, white and immigrant workers in the US with their class brothers and sisters internationally. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) will assist Kaiser workers to coordinate their struggles with healthcare workers in Canada, Mexico and across the world.
The fight for safe and affordable healthcare is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself, which subordinates every aspect of social life to profit. In defending healthcare, Kaiser workers are defending the right to life for the entire working class.
There is no time to lose.
As the Israeli military intensifies its genocide deep into Gaza, plunging millions of Palestinians into conditions of unimaginable suffering, outrage among workers and youth over the catastrophe has sparked another massive wave of protests across the globe this past weekend. On October 5, 2025, in Amsterdam, the third “Red Line” demonstration took place, marking the largest anti-war protest in the Netherlands since the anti‑nuclear protests in 1981.
What began as a protest of 100,000 people in The Hague on May 18 grew in less than four weeks to 150,000 at the second “Red Line” demonstration on June 15—followed by the fall of the Dutch government—surging to an estimated 250,000 demonstrators in Amsterdam last weekend.
The anti-war protests and strikes that have swept across the country over the past two years have transformed the Netherlands’ major cities into centers of global resistance against war, genocide, austerity, and authoritarian rule. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch and immigrant workers and youth across all ages, industries, and walks of life filled Amsterdam’s canal-lined streets and squares in solidarity with the defenseless Palestinians.
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The Dutch ruling elite has a long history of political complicity with the Zionist state, from its inception on stolen Palestinian land to the present Netanyahu administration, with which it maintains close economic and military collaboration. These ties have made both regimes a focus of intense opposition among Dutch workers and youth.
Dutch exports licenses for fighter-jet components and other military hardware to Israel, with total arms-exports to Israel reported as US $33 million in 2024. Recent court rulings have challenged but not halted any of these licenses—one of the central demands of university students engaged in years-long sit-in protests across campuses.
The radicalization of thousands of workers and young people across the Netherlands by two years of barbaric slaughter of Palestinians has sharply exposed the gulf separating the sentiments of the vast majority of the population and the establishment parties.
6. Emboldened by Trump, Ford expands police-state searches to Chicago plant
The blatant violation of basic constitutional protections coincided with and was encouraged by Trump’s deployment of troops to Chicago.
7. Poet Tony Harrison: a classical voice
Tony Harrison, who has died aged 88, was one of the most compelling English poetic voices of the last 60 years. He was always faithful to his vocation. “I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director,” he said. “Poet covers it all for me.”
Harrison was determined that the “quest for a public poetry” should not abandon the artistic accomplishments of the past. His commitment to accessible cultural achievement gave him a political fire. “Yes, I’ve got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honor that as well.”
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In 2009, accepting the inaugural PEN Harold Pinter Prize, he called for continued vigilance against censorship and injustice, saying some regimes put their poets in prison, while “we put ours in Poets’ Corner! I sincerely hope to be spared both.”
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In 2009, Harrison insisted that “A poet’s rage has as much place in his poetry as [Wordsworth’s] ‘emotion recalled in tranquillity.’” He spoke of being recalled from delight in his apple trees by the “horrors … from Blair, Bush and their coalition cohorts, and the illegal occupation of Iraq.” As he put it, “The contemplation of the apple blossom is continually broken by rage at political events.”
It was a healthy instinct, and his artistic seriousness and integrity should be celebrated.
8. Right-wing resignation sharpens conflicts in Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition
The potential splits wracking the opposition Liberal-National Coalition have hardened since one of its most right-wing Liberal Party leaders, Andrew Hastie, quit the shadow cabinet last Friday.
The survival of the Coalition, a mainstay of capitalist rule since World War II, alongside the Labor Party, is being thrown into doubt following the further collapse of its middle-class urban base in its devastating defeat in the May federal election.
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This is a political crisis of historic dimensions. In the May election, the Coalition was reduced to a parliamentary rump, especially in the capital cities, holding just nine out of 88 metropolitan seats. The Liberal vote fell to its lowest level since it was formed in 1944. The rural-based Nationals’ vote stagnated, but the Nationals gained greater relative numbers inside the Coalition’s shrunken parliamentary bloc.
The Liberals lost more—now nearly all—of their once blue-ribbon city seats in wealthy areas to “green industry”-backed “Teal” independents. Well-resourced by corporate donors, the Teals support “net zero” and promote the underlying myth, together with Labor, that catastrophic climate change can be reversed by the capitalist profit system itself.
The Liberals’ rout permitted the Albanese Labor government to win a commanding majority of seats in the House of Representatives, despite obtaining only about a third of the primary vote—its second-lowest support since the 1930s.
Far from a sign of political strength or stability, this was a win by default. Labor benefited from the widespread opposition to the Trump-style policies espoused by then Liberal leader Peter Dutton, which featured the establishment of an Elon Musk-type “Department of Government Efficiency” and the sacking of thousands of public servants.
Even after last-minute backpedaling, as the popular hostility to Trump’s fascistic agenda became obvious, Dutton lost his own seat. That triggered a fractious Liberal Party parliamentary ballot for a new leader.
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ut this political crisis goes deeper. It reflects the disintegration of the Liberals’ post-World War II social base among middle-class layers, including professionals and small business operators, who are under mounting financial pressure, while billionaires’ fortunes soar.
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In the Murdoch media’s Australian, national editor Dennis Shanahan warned on Sunday: “Hastie’s actions are undoubtedly a threat to the Opposition Leader whether directly or indirectly, imminently or later but, also, a threat to the wider ‘institutionalized’ political system which includes all the major and minor parties and independents.”
Shanahan voiced fears that Hastie’s moves could fuel the widespread disaffection with the capitalist parties and trigger deeper opposition. “Hastie could be a figurehead or titular leader to an organic movement that he does not or cannot control but which … weakens even further the hold of the Liberals, Nationals and ALP on disillusioned sections of the public.”
The ruling class now depends more than ever on the Labor government and its trade union enforcers, already distrusted by many workers, to impose their corporate agenda, which includes scapegoating immigrants, slashing disability and other social services, aiding the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and ramping up military spending to support the AUKUS pact for war against China.
As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the militarist, anti-immigrant and rightward plunge of the Labor government and the entire political establishment, paralleling the political processes in the United States and Europe, can be answered only by building a socialist movement of the working class, in Australia and internationally.
9. Lula talks to Trump amid US escalation against Venezuela
Trump and Lula, as well as members of their administrations, welcomed this initial conversation, which will continue in the coming weeks and months with the possibility of face-to-face meetings between them. Brazilian media reported that Bolsonaro was not mentioned in the conversation, and Folha de S. Paulo quoted a minister in Lula’s administration as saying that it “was friendly, but ‘superficial.’”
On his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump wrote that the call with Lula was “very good” and that the “main focus [of the conversation] was the economy and trade between our two countries.” He added that “Our countries will prosper together!”
In turn, Lula wrote on X, “we recall the good chemistry we had at the meeting in New York during the UN General Assembly,” continuing: “I consider our direct contact as an opportunity to restore the 201-year-old friendly relations between the two largest democracies in the West.”
The meeting between Lula and Trump behind the scenes at the UN General Assembly and the possibility of a conversation between them were prepared weeks in advance, with high-level members of both governments in the diplomatic, commercial, and economic spheres holding numerous meetings. An influential layer of capitalists linked to Brazilian manufacturing, the main sector affected by the tariffs, also worked closely with the Lula administration and participated in negotiations with their American counterparts and the Trump administration.
There was also strong pressure from Democratic congressmen and a wing of Republicans, as well as from a powerful American business sector, denouncing the tariffs against Brazil for increasing inflation on products widely consumed in the US, such as coffee. They also argued that they could lead to thousands of US layoffs, and, not least, the expansion of Brazil’s trade relations with China, which has already overtaken the US to become the country’s largest trading partner.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has insisted, there is a militarist agenda behind Trump’s trade war. It is one of the fronts in a war aimed at reversing by military means the loss of US hegemony with the rise of China in recent decades. In the drive toward a military conflict with the Asian giant, the Trump administration views Latin America as a future battlefield.
The US offensive against the region has intensified dramatically in recent weeks. Washington's series of extrajudicial killings in missile strikes against small boats off the coast of Venezuela, based on unproven claims that they were transporting drugs, has been accompanied by bellicose statements from Trump, who threatened Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: “leave America in peace, or be blown up in fire and fury never seen before.”
The Lula administration's response to this development has been a combination of concern and accommodation with US imperialism, as the recent conversation between Lula and Trump showed. Lula remained silent about the first US attacks on boats off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, so as not to jeopardize the ongoing negotiations that led to his recent phone call with Trump. At the same time, in addition to not recognizing Maduro’s reelection, as the Estado report noted, the Lula administration was responsible for blocking Venezuela’s entry into the BRICS.
A central concern of the Lula administration is that a US invasion of Venezuela could spill over into Brazil, which shares a border of more than 2,000 km with Venezuela in the sensitive Amazon rainforest region. Since Venezuela's claim to Essequibo in December 2023, the Lula administration has militarized this border. Now, the Brazilian armed forces are conducting the largest military exercise in their history, involving 10,000 troops and the use of their most advanced military equipment in the Amazon region.
The Trump administration may be considering Brazil a potential ally in its plans for a regime change war against Venezuela. In this sense, the rapprochement between the Lula and Trump administrations is a central component of the ongoing US offensive.
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The Lula government is staging a difficult and delicate balancing act between China and the US with the illusion that it can benefit from the emerging conflict between these global giants. This orientation only exposes the Lula government's inability to offer a progressive response to the growing crisis of global capitalism, of which Trump’s tariff war and Washington’s escalation against Venezuela in preparation for a war against China are both parts.
The insistence that the Trump administration’s offensive against Latin America can be stopped at the negotiating table only serves to disarm workers across the region as they confront the necessity of carrying out a unified struggle against capitalism across national borders.
10. European Union imposes professional ban on German citizen, critical journalist Hüseyin Doğru
On May 20, 2025, the European Union (EU) took an unprecedented step: for the first time, German citizens and journalists were targeted by sweeping sanctions as part of the EU’s 17th sanctions package against Russia. Those affected include Berlin-based Turkish-Kurdish journalist and German citizen Hüseyin Doğru, founder of the media platform Red Media, as well as German-born journalists Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, who live in Russia.
The sanctions against Doğru include the freezing of all bank accounts, an EU-wide travel ban and a de facto professional ban. This means that Doğru is forbidden from engaging in any form of paid employment or self-employment, and no one is legally permitted to provide him with any economic resources. In practice, even inviting him for a coffee would constitute a criminal offence.
The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the Red Media ban.
According to the EU’s justification, Doğru’s reporting on the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany “sows ethnic, political and religious discord” and thus aids “Russia’s destabilizing activities.”
Not only Doğru’s bank account but also that of his pregnant wife has been frozen, even though she is not named on the sanctions list. Doğru can access only a minimal subsistence allowance after weeks of approval by the Bundesbank (German Federal Bank). His freedom of movement has been curtailed, and he cannot legally be employed as a journalist—for instance by junge Welt, which inquired about hiring him—because, according to the German Economics Ministry, such employment would violate the EU’s “prohibition on making funds available” and would constitute a criminal offense.
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The aggressiveness with which German authorities have enforced and defended the sanctions against a German citizen and journalist strongly suggests that Berlin itself was instrumental in initiating them.
The EU Council decision of October 8, 2024, which underpins these sanctions, defines “Russian influence activities” so broadly that virtually any critical political expression can be penalized. It is sufficient to be “planning, directing, participating in, supporting or otherwise facilitating the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference” to face sanctions—one of eight possible grounds. The word “disinformation” appears only in the preamble, not in the legal articles, and there is no statutory definition of “coordinated information manipulation.”
The EU’s External Action Service defines “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” (FIMI) as a usually non-illegal behaviour pattern that “can threaten or negatively affect values, procedures and political processes,” conducted “deliberately and in a coordinated way by state or non-state actors, including their proxies.”
To be clear, “a non-illegal [!] form of behavior that merely contradicts official government policy” is sufficient grounds to deprive someone of their livelihood, impose an absolute professional and travel ban, subject them to surveillance and publicly stigmatize them.
The regulation also applies to “non-state actors and their proxies,” even if they only indirectly support or facilitate such supposed “illegal behavior.” These are the hallmarks of a police-state regime trampling on freedom of expression.
The case of Hüseyin Doğru starkly demonstrates how little it takes to become a victim of such measures—just a handful of critical social media posts, support for protests, or tenuous associations with “hostile” countries or organizations. It is an extremely dangerous precedent for suppressing dissenting journalists. Doğru’s warning that mainstream media, unions and press associations are ignoring—or even collaborating in—this repression is entirely justified.
A press release by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) on September 29 announced there was an “Improved pay offer for Tube workers” following talks with Transport for London (TfL).
But RMT’s cursory 100-word statement reporting the outcome of weeks of closed-door discussions with London Underground Limited (LUL) management shows its claims of an “improvement” are hollow.
LUL’s 3.4 percent pay offer for this year remains unchanged—despite RMT members having rejected this pittance during their week-long strike in September. They were joined by colleagues on London’s Docklands Light Railway who threw out an identical below-inflation deal, with RPI at 4.6 percent.
The RMT and LUL have repackaged this miserly sum into a three-year deal, which includes RPI-linked uplifts in the second and third years. A separate RMT circular to members on September 29 confirms LUL management has met none of the strike’s key demands. On pay alone, a real-terms wage cut this year will be followed by two years of pay stagnation.
The RMT press release stated, “RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey congratulated members for their steadfast support for strike action.” But RMT members launched strike action to demand a cost-of-living increase. Dempsey and RMT negotiators disappeared into meetings with LUL management and TfL executives from September 17, demobilizing the rank-and-file opposition and suppressing a current strike mandate while they put together a sellout agreement.
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What is now unraveling in closed-door talks between RMT officials and management is Dempsey’s hollow claim that a “compromise” can be reached which “works on both sides”. This language of collaboration has inevitably led to complete surrender.
Dempsey’s negotiations—described as “peace talks”—were convened to stifle demands for action against savage new cuts being demanded by [London's] Labour mayor Sadiq Khan. This includes further ticket office closures. Dempsey knows that any challenge to Khan involves a direct confrontation with the austerity dictates of the Starmer Labour government—a political fight that would win mass support.
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Tube workers across the network have expressed their dissatisfaction. A World Socialist Web Site article, “Eddie Dempsey calls for ‘compromise’ in London Underground ‘peace talks’: Workers must seize the initiative”, provoked interest and discussion over the past week.
A station assistant on the Bakerloo line said, “I’ve briefly read the offer. It is the same old line… the company are refusing to meet our demands on fatigue. It used to be the case that colleagues working in the Kings Cross area stayed in the area. Now I’m hearing they are asking staff to go to other areas because of staff shortages. That was never the case in the past. Staff shortages are not dealt with in the latest offer, putting more pressure on us as they are desperate to get staff to cover areas. Thank you for doing this. I’ll read your leaflet and hand it out. “
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Tube workers must intervene to prevent a sell-out deal between the RMT executive and reps. The membership mandated the action. Yet not only have their key demands not been met, but they have also been ditched. On this basis, the revised offer is unfit to put to a ballot. Workplace meetings must be organized to register opposition to this sellout and assert rank-and-file control of the dispute.
In practice, Dempsey and the union executive agree that any deal must be self-financed by workers. De facto productivity increases are already being implemented through collusion with the RMT. This includes staff being used to plug the gaping hole left by the cull of 2,000 station staff jobs and no demand for the reinstatement of these positions or for restoring public safety. It also includes the reduction in employer contributions to the pension scheme last year, agreed by the RMT behind the backs of Tube workers.
The rank-and-file should meet to formulate non-negotiable demands, including the mass recruitment of staff and to end unsociable and dangerous shift patterns that are reducing workers’ life expectancy. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote last week: “Workers must reject claims there is “no money” to fund their demands. Billions must be allocated to upgrade and expand the Tube, DLR and national rail, improving pay, conditions and pensions while making transport affordable. This requires a political struggle against the Starmer government, which is funneling billions into military rearmament and war, with workers footing the bill through austerity.”
12. Israel attacks another aid flotilla days after illegal capture of the Global Sumud Flotilla
In another act of piracy in international waters, Israel’s military intercepted and seized a 145-strong crew of the nine vessel Freedom Flotilla Coalition and Thousand Madleens.
The flotilla was on its way to Gaza, attempting to break Israel’s siege and deliver desperately needed food and medical supplies to the Palestinians. It left the port of San Giovanni Li Cuti in Catania, Sicily on September 27. Onboard were healthcare workers, doctors, journalists, elected officials from the Belgian, Danish, European Union, Irish, French, Spanish and US legislatures, and others.
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In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with the Freedom Flotilla 120 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, organizers reported that three of its boats were under attack from the IDF. The interception involved the lead ship Conscience, which carried most of the flotilla crew (92) being attacked by a military helicopter. The IDF jammed signals on the three flotilla boats and surrounded the remaining fleet.
The Freedom Flotilla in a statement said “Gaza Sunbirds, Alaa Al-Najajr, Anas Al-Sharif, have been attacked and illegally intercepted by the Israeli military at 04:34 at 120 nautical miles (220km) from Gaza.
“Sources so far indicate that the unarmed crew aboard, including doctors, journalists, and elected officials, have been abducted, as well as the vital aid worth over $110,000 USD in medicines, respiratory equipment, and nutritional supplies that were destined for Gaza’s starving hospitals. Their whereabouts remain unknown.”
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A statement from the Israeli government following their latest act of piracy stated, “The vessels and the passengers are transferred to an Israeli port. All the passengers are safe and in good health. The passengers are expected to be deported promptly.'
None of this can be taken at face value. More details have emerged of the torture—both physical and psychological--that the crew of the Global Sumud Flotilla were subjected to. Speaking at a news conference in Stockholm on her return to Sweden, Greta Thunberg said that she and other detainees were subjected to torture in an Israeli prison. Turkish activist Ersin Celik told Anadolu that Israeli forces 'severely tortured Greta before our eyes,' and 'made her crawl and made her kiss the Israeli flag.' Thunberg told media, 'Personally, I don't want to share what I was subjected to because I don't want it to make headlines and 'Greta has been tortured', because that's not the story here”. She added that what they had suffered paled in comparison to what the Palestinians experienced daily.
13. Free Selahattin Demirtaş and all Turkey’s political prisoners!
On the final day it was eligible to contest the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling on human rights violations and the political imprisonment of Selahattin Demirtaş, the former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s Ministry of Justice filed an appeal. The ECHR had ordered that Demirtaş, who remains imprisoned, be released immediately.
The objection and the political imprisonment of Selahattin Demirtaş once again expose the falseness of the claims that the ongoing negotiations between the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as well as the commission established in parliament as part of these negotiations, will bring peace and democracy.
The Socialist Equality Party—Fourth International has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the Kurdish nationalist movement. But we fundamentally oppose the ongoing repression of the Kurdish people and politicians by the Erdoğan government and uncompromisingly defends the recognition of their fundamental democratic rights. Demirtaş; the other imprisoned HDP leader, Figen Yüksekdağ; the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor and presidential candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu; and all other political prisoners, including numerous figures from Kurdish politics and left organizations must be released immediately.
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The ongoing persecution of Kurdish politicians, exemplified by Demirtaş, is not merely a matter of a personal vendetta. It is primarily an expression of the ruling elite’s inability to recognize and defend fundamental democratic rights and their need for an authoritarian regime to advance their interests. Even if Demirtaş or Öcalan were released from prison, this would not be linked to efforts to establish a democratic regime but rather to ongoing negotiations between Turkish and Kurdish elites as part of the imperialist war in the Middle East.
The World Socialist Web Site has emphasized from the outset that the new negotiations have no connection whatsoever with a democratic solution to the Kurdish question, and that such a solution can only be achieved through the revolutionary mobilization of the working class to seize power against imperialism and its regional proxies. What is at stake is an attempt at a reactionary agreement between the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie, in line with US imperialism. It must be rejected by the Turkish, Kurdish, and other workers and oppressed masses in the Middle East from an internationalist perspective.
The intensification of the imperialist war of redivision in the Middle East, which includes the genocide in Gaza and the war for regime change in Syria, and the growing competition between Turkey and Israel, led Ankara to seek a renewed agreement with the PKK in 2024. The Erdoğan government, with the support of Öcalan, whose meeting minutes indicating his stance in favor of the Turkish state against the Israeli state were leaked, put forward a perspective of a reactionary “Turkish-Kurdish-Arab” alliance to counter Israel’s expansionist ambitions in the region.
Erdoğan reiterated this perspective on Wednesday, referring to the armed clashes in Syria between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose backbone is the YPG, and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) regime: “The Syrian Democratic Forces must keep their promise. They must complete their integration with Syria... Those who turn their direction towards Ankara and Damascus will prevail. The Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab alliance is the key to eternal peace and tranquillity in the region.”
Erdoğan is calling on the SDF to cooperate with the regimes in Ankara and Damascus, not Tel Aviv, claiming that this will bring peace to the region. The fallacy of this claim is evident in the fact that not only Tel Aviv and the SDF, but also Ankara and Damascus have turned toward the US. All these powers and the Arab regimes in the region are complicit in the aggressive actions of the imperialist powers led by Washington that are destroying the Middle East. This includes the genocide in Gaza.
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In recent days, clashes between HTŞ and SDG forces have escalated in northern and eastern Syria, which is under SDG control, and in the Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo. The escalation between forces that played a role as US allies in the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, in December 2024 after a 13-year regime change war, is seen as a threat to Washington’s “new Middle East” plans. A war in Syria between pro-Ankara and pro-Damascus forces and Kurdish militias, which could draw Israel in, could shatter the axis the US is trying to build, particularly against Iran.
14. Australia: Court bans protest against Gaza genocide at the Sydney Opera House
The New South Wales (NSW) Court of Appeal this morning banned a march to the Sydney Opera House on Sunday, which was to mark two years of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
The Palestine Action Group (PAG) had selected the iconic location to provide the population with an opportunity to send a message to the world, in opposition to the support for the atrocities by the federal Labor government and the entire political establishment.
The court accepted the evidence of the NSW Police that the rally would pose an unacceptable risk to public safety.
In taking that evidence at face value, the judgement abstracted the inherently political question of whether the march would be permitted from its political context.
The NSW Police leadership has been intensely hostile to pro-Palestinian protests. The only serious incidents of violence at such protests have been perpetrated by the police themselves, rendering their concern for the safety of demonstrators spurious.
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Before the police initiated court action, the NSW Labor government’s police minister Yasmin Catley made clear that the protest would not be allowed. Catley did not cite safety, but the fact that the by-laws governing the Opera House include a blanket ban on protests.
On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared, “Tomorrow is not a day for demonstrations,” because it was the two year anniversary of the October 7 Palestinian military operation. Albanese and other senior Labor leaders denounced a separate pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown that day, on those explicitly political grounds.
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Even as the legal case was underway, the NSW government failed to conceal its political motives. According to the Australian Associated Press, “Outside court, NSW Premier Chris Minns has backed police, noting a protest outside the waterside venue in October 2023, when an Israeli flag was set alight and some protesters chanted antisemitic slurs.”
That 2023 protest occurred because Minns made the highly provocative decision to light up the Opera House sails in the colors of the Israeli flag, as the Zionist regime was already carpet-bombing Gaza.
The incidents at the protest were blown out of all proportion, partly based on a Zionist group posting doctored footage of an antisemitic chant that was not made.
Federal opposition leader Sussan Ley blurted out the real character of the political establishment’s campaign for the rally to be banned. She hysterically denounced the organizers for “sowing division and tearing at social cohesion,” declaring that “The Sydney Opera House belongs to all Australians, not activists and protestors.”
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In their arguments against the police’s attempt to ban the protest, the organizers had intended to raise the implied right to freedom of political speech in the Constitution, which, they argued, trumped the Opera House by-laws.
They also requested that the court take a position on whether Israel was committing a genocide. This, they argued, was relevant to the public interest of the protest and its urgency, and there was scope for such a determination given the statements of authoritative experts on genocide and international legal bodies. The court declined.
While accepting the police attempts to limit the issue entirely to the question of public safety, the court did permit lawyers representing the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies to tender evidence in the proceedings.
That was an unusual decision. Notwithstanding their names, the two bodies are not politically impartial. They are rabidly pro-Israeli lobby groups. ECAJ leaders have issued statements explicitly defending Israeli war crimes, including the bombing of hospitals.
Their legal representatives were nevertheless permitted to enter into the court record hazy and unsubstantiated claims that allowing the rally to proceed would cause “fear” within the Jewish community. Notwithstanding that, of the two groups organizing the protest, one is composed of anti-Zionist Jews, this was a case of organizations that support the genocide demanding that a peaceful protest against it be illegalized.
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What is the broader record of the NSW Police, in relation to safety at pro-Palestinian protests?
- In June, police set upon a small protest outside a defense-related company in the Sydney suburb of Belmore, declaring it to be unauthorized. A police officer allegedly assaulted legal observer Hannah Thomas, causing horrific facial injuries and threatening the sight in her eye.
NSW Police command defended the rampage, but was subsequently unable to explain the legal grounds upon which they banned and attacked the rally. Only months later did they charge the officer with assault.- In March 2024, at a peaceful pro-Palestinian protest in Sydney, several activists poured paint on themselves to symbolize the blood of murdered Palestinians. Police officers, acting in an irrational and thuggish manner, responded by tackling the activists, throwing them to the ground and pinning them down for no apparent reason.
- At two protests at the Botany port, police went on a rampage, dragging demonstrators who were peacefully sitting on a road.
Such are the guardians of public safety.
In their ruling today, the Court of Appeal declared that anybody who violated their prohibition could be found in contempt of court, the penalty for which can include prison time. That is a strengthening of state powers against the democratic right to protest, going beyond previous judgements that such a prohibition only removes certain legal protections from demonstrators.
15. Daily protests in Berlin against the interception of the Sumud flotilla and the genocide in Gaza
Following the criminal interception of the Sumud flotilla carrying aid supplies, there has been a wave of major protests around the world. In Rome alone, 1 million people protested on Saturday, following a nationwide general strike the day before. In Amsterdam, 250,000 people demonstrated, and in Barcelona, 70,000.
In Germany, rallies have been announced to take place in numerous cities throughout the week, with a national demonstration planned in Berlin for Saturday. A rally marking the anniversary of October 7 was banned in Berlin, and demonstrators who gathered anyway were kettled in by police.
The day before, around 500 participants gathered for a rally at the Foreign Office in central Berlin. Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site were on site and discussed with participants a socialist perspective to end the genocide, which met with lively interest. By the end of the rally, almost everyone had a copy of the WSWS statement “The interception of the Sumud flotilla and the fight against genocide in Gaza.”
One rally participant, Christian, vehemently disputed the false equation of criticism of genocide with “antisemitism.” He stated:
“I have to say: the greatest threat to Judaism is equating the nation-state project of Israel with the religion of Judaism. No other religion or state would be allowed to appropriate an entire religion and religious community for itself. Israel’s nation-state project is a settler colony, at the end of the day a Western project that uses and abuses religion as a shield. This constant conflation of Zionism with Judaism also jeopardises the lives of Jews here in Germany.”
On Trump’s announced “peace plan,” he said, “The Palestinians still have no self-determination, and in the end it is just a plan forged in Washington and Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, with Tony Blair as colonial governor. The Palestinians’ right to self-determination, which is enshrined in the UN Charter, continues to be trampled underfoot. Therefore, this plan is at best a fig leaf or a distraction, but never a final solution.”
When asked about the nominally left-wing parties in Germany that also support genocide, he explained, “I would no longer describe the SPD as a workers’ party. The SPD will only make capitalism or imperialism a little more bearable, but it will not overcome it. And the Left Party is also a disappointment when it comes to solidarity with Palestine. ... The Left Party cannot really be seen as a socialist or workers’ party either. Unfortunately, the German parliamentary left can be forgotten.”
16. German Chancellor Merz justifies genocide in Gaza
Countless pupils have read George Orwell’s novel 1984 in secondary school. What took place yesterday in Germany, however, surpasses Orwell’s dystopian vision. The second anniversary of the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was the occasion for a propaganda campaign in which one omission, distortion and lie was trumped by the next. Hardly a word was spoken, hardly a line published that did not turn reality on its head.
Flags flew at half-mast throughout Germany, and memorial services were held everywhere for the 1,200 Israeli victims of the Hamas attack. At the same time, there was barely a mention of the murder of at least 67,000 Palestinians, the displacement of another 2 million, the use of hunger as a weapon, the destruction of hospitals, schools and almost all residential buildings in Gaza, as well as all other documented war crimes committed by the Israeli government and army.
Silence means consent. The German government is deeply complicit in the crimes of the Netanyahu regime. It supports it with weapons, defends it politically and cracks down on anyone who protests against the genocide of the Palestinians.
The reason is not—and never has been—“making amends for the Holocaust.” The German government uses the Zionist state to pursue its own imperialist interests in the resource-rich and strategically important region of the Middle East. It supports Israel because, as Chancellor Friedrich Merz admitted in a rare moment of honesty, it “is doing the dirty work for all of us.”
The Palestinians stand in the way of complete imperialist control over the Middle East. That is why they must be destroyed. Washington, Berlin, Tel Aviv and the reactionary Arab rulers all agree on this. This is why they all cheer US President Trump’s “peace plan,” which leaves the Palestinians the option of either renouncing all their rights or being exterminated.
The commemorative events on October 7 were a cynical attempt to obscure these facts. They were not aimed at showing solidarity with the victims of October 7—whose relatives have been protesting against Netanyahu for two years—but to intimidate everyone, including the numerous Jews who reject the genocide in Gaza.
The highest representatives of the German state all took part. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited a synagogue in Leipzig. Bundestag President Julia Klöckner opened an exhibition at Tempelhof Airport that reconstructs the attack on the Nova music festival. And Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned in a video address of growing antisemitism in Germany. At the Brandenburg Gate, the names of the victims of the Hamas attack were read out and the words “Bring them home now” projected.
In the course of all this, the entire historical and political background was denied and the Hamas attack portrayed as an act of terrorism that came out of the blue to strike a peaceful Israel—instead of as a reaction to the 75-year history of the brutal oppression of the Palestinians and the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison.
Hamas itself, an Islamist, nationalist organization with no viable perspective, was long promoted by Israel as a counterweight to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), whose transformation into a compliant instrument of Israel ultimately led to the rise of the seemingly more radical Islamists.
The claim that Israel was taken by surprise by the Hamas attack has also long been refuted. In fact, Israeli intelligence had known about the plans for months. Nevertheless, all Israeli troops were withdrawn from the border, allowing the lightly armed Hamas fighters to enter Israel unhindered.
When Israeli troops finally arrived several hours later, they proceeded so aggressively with combat helicopters and tanks that numerous Israelis, an estimated 360 out of 1,140, were killed by Israeli soldiers and not by Hamas. There has never been an independent investigation into this. The so-called Hannibal Directive, according to which soldiers are killed to prevent them from being taken hostage, is also said to have been implemented.
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The rise of antisemitism in Germany, which both Chancellor Merz and the Left Party invoke, is another Orwellian distortion.
There is no doubt that antisemitism exists in Germany, but its main source is the ranks and milieu of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose leaders have described the Holocaust as a “piece of fly shit” in an otherwise glorious German history (Alexander Gauland) and the Holocaust Memorial as a “disgrace for Germany” (Björn Höcke). At the same time, the AfD stands firmly behind the Israeli government, whose actions against the Palestinians are fully in line with the AfD’s own hostility towards Muslims and migrants.
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Support for the genocide in Gaza and the slander and suppression of opposition to it must be understood in the context of the massive rearmament and attacks on social services and the living standards of the working class. Faced with the growing crisis of global capitalism, the ruling class, starting with Trump in the United States, is turning once again towards war and fascism. Only an independent, socialist movement of the working class can stop this development.
17. Australian Climate Risk Assessment issues dire warnings
Prepared by the country’s leading official scientific bodies, the report predicts extreme heat and heatwaves, significant sea level rise and increased coastal hazards affecting millions of people.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), unanimously adopted this document at its founding congress on June 13–15, 2025. It traces the central historical experiences of the working class and Marxist movement in the 20th and 21st centuries, and establishes the principled foundations for the building of the Trotskyist movement in Turkey and throughout the region.
New sections of the document will be published in coming days. Here are the latest published sections of a total of 33:
19. The Global Revolutionary Crisis of 1968-75 and the Split in the International Committee
20. Stalinism, Pabloism and Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism in Turkey
21. The Cyprus Issue
22. Security and the Fourth International
23. The Global Capitalist Counteroffensive and the 1980 Military Coup
24. The Kurdish Issue and the PKK
20. Demand the freedom of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site have initiated a global campaign to demand the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. The fight for Bogdan’s freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
